


Blood, Love, and Rhetoric

by Germinal



Series: Blood Love and Rhetoric [1]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Gen, M/M, Pastiche, Politics, Unresolved Sexual Tension, counter-culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-19
Updated: 2013-02-19
Packaged: 2017-11-29 20:52:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/691316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Germinal/pseuds/Germinal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daft and not very historically rigorous Les Amis AU, set throughout the 1960s. NB I do like Bob Dylan and can only offer my apologies that Grantaire doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood, Love, and Rhetoric

**Author's Note:**

  * For [forgiveninasong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgiveninasong/gifts).



**Blood, Love, and Rhetoric**

1/?: _We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it._

 

The wine hasn't helped, and neither has the whiskey. Perhaps the brandy will. Enjolras has been entreated to extend his set far beyond his allotted ten minutes, and no one seems to mind except Grantaire. From his habitual slope in the ABC Café's far corner, a primitive wallflower twined like a vine against the wall, he can see them all, their faces upturned to the light of the stage, packing the doorway and blocking the pavement outside. Onstage, Enjolras is still singing, his sincerity almost painful to observe, looking and sounding as though he's held together only by surface tension, and he still has the crowd in the palm of his hand.

 

Grantaire is unimpressed. God knows – well, Grantaire does, at least – Enjolras is capable of breathless and breathtaking relevance and eloquence in rhetoric, and quite why he has chosen this evening to sacrifice both on the altar of vacuous populism almost bereft of useful meaning is a mystery to Grantaire and probably to God too. The song had started badly – in the opinion of Grantaire, _“How many roads must a man walk down, before you will call him a man_?” is the sort of question posed only in Philosophy exams for no other reason than to check the student's capacity for detecting platitudinous bullshit - and, Grantaire is sorry to announce, the song had only gone downhill from there.

 

Enjolras' face under the spotlight is Christlike, of course: his eyes, wide in earnest concentration, fixed on the posters and scrawled peace signs on the café's back wall, his fingers, pale and smooth as alabaster, amateurishly strumming the strings of the battered guitar. If Grantaire could only adjust the settings of the world this evening – if he could switch off or turn down the audio, if he could focus unobstructed on the way Enjolras' lips part and purse around the words he's singing, how sharply the shadows pool under his cheekbones, how precisely the burnished gold of his hair haloes his face – this performance might almost verge on bearable. But he can't.

 

_“Yes and how many times must the cannonballs fly, before they are forever banned...?”_

 

Who _wrote_ this drivel? Who thinks it's possible, whether theoretically or practically, to somehow ban a cannonball? The words would be ridiculous enough even if the offence weren't compounded by their daring to be anywhere near Enjolras' mouth.

_“Yes and how many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died...?”_

 

There's a scatter of applause at that. There's even a couple of shouts of “Right on!” and a smartly raised fist from some impressively grubby street kid sitting on the corner of the stage, but this is quickly shushed into the respectfully silent awe which Enjolras always inspires without even having to demand it.

 

Oh, how _soulful_. How fucking _deep_. Grantaire suspects these boys have never seen a drop of blood spilled since the last screening of _The Magnificent Seven_. And Enjolras, for all his study and strategy and the rumours of his underground contacts in Berlin and Chicago and all over Latin America, suffers nonetheless from the historically illiterate idea that revolutions can be won and lost with words.

 

The song finishes to rapturous applause. Enjolras makes a mock bow to the crowd, the spotlight playing off his silky gold curls, and hands the café's guitar to the next unfortunate open-mic turn, whose dismay is already apparent on his face and who will find this act impossible to follow. Grantaire refills his glass. Most of this crowd wouldn't last five minutes on a picket line, never mind a barricade.

 

Enjolras waves away the drinks they offer him, and the fawning congratulations, as he makes his way back to the table. He slips his ridiculous flatcap back on, its dark material extinguishing the blaze of his hair. Grantaire detects a certain trembling to his hands, which could be cold or nervousness or illness or adrenaline or any combination of them all. Combeferre presses another black coffee into his hands and wraps his heavy flannel coat around his shoulders as he takes his seat, which Enjolras accepts without a word of thanks, although he does incline his head up slightly, casually munificent, and allow his right-hand man to chastely kiss his forehead. Observing them, Grantaire fears his own facial expression has ended up halfway between a sneer and a smirk.

 

Enjolras, Grantaire notes with renewed admiration, _does not stop_. No sooner has he taken a seat than he is up again, immediately talking of the need for further action, spreading that day's newspaper flat across the tabletop, organising, directing, drawing up lists of responsibilities. Tomorrow the strike at some factory or other is entering its seventh week and a show of solidarity is apparently needed from across the city. The day after that there is a civil rights rally taking place and after that there is an anti-war meeting somewhere in the next town over and then there is the next meeting of Students for a Democratic Society which at least one of those present must attend and then there are the latest reports from Cuba to be gone through, and what this means for them is that the next few days must be entirely spent in animated and tireless discussion on how best to maximise awareness of the issues at stake in the world and how to raise the consciousness of the class. Enjolras will not sleep, for there are pamphlets to be written, placards to be stuck together and, in all wretched probability, songs to be sung.

 

Courfeyrac has a half-smoked joint between his fingers, at which Enjolras glares so pointedly that it should by rights combust from sheer embarrassment. Courfeyrac is unabashed and merely widens his eyes across the table at his leader, his smile turned up to an almost obnoxious level of dazzling, and coolly exhales a stream of smoke towards the café ceiling. Enjolras shakes his head but lets the matter drop. Grantaire, in spite of himself, quite likes Courfeyrac, who runs ridiculous risks and talks back to his arresting officers and spends his father's money on obscure old blues records and sets up shady assignations with a guy from the Patron-Minette mob so that Enjolras can assess the possibility of acquiring guns and ammunition, but whose brushes with authority only seem to trouble him when he gets caught by his landlady with a girl in his room overnight (or, more rarely, a boy – and, on one particularly legendary occasion, both at once).

 

Enjolras, however, does not relax in this or any other manner. Enjolras does not _chill_. Enjolras will not kick back or unwind or _mellow out_ or _take it easy, man_ for even the space of a song, and, in a perverse and convoluted way, Grantaire is glad of this. Notoriously, Enjolras does not fuck, or drink, and scarcely seems to sleep. Grantaire can barely recall him eating anything more substantial than the scraps Combeferre or Courfeyrac are prone to give him off their own plates, when overwork and overthinking have tipped his habitual paleness and fragility into something feverish and slightly frightening, and his lieutenants are obliged to more or less tie him to his bed so he will get some rest and to spoonfeed him back to full strength (as if this solicitude were some kind of hardship, some burden for which the two of them have been noble enough to volunteer). His asceticism, his restraint, his abhorrence of all things except revolutionary fervour and discipline, leaves him strikingly, stunningly tightly strung, a bow ready to fire. The indulgences that sap one's revolutionary zeal, holding no appeal for Enjolras except as targets of his magnificent, overwhelming scorn, are often all that keep Grantaire upright and functioning. But he figures someone has to be above it all, and Enjolras does above-it-all better than anyone Grantaire can imagine.

 

The conversation has turned back to Enjolras' performance this evening, to music as a means of political expression and encouragement, to folk songs as the pure and uncorrupted voice of the people and a vehicle for bringing the world together as one. Jehan is talking excitedly, poetically, his eyes shining, his hands emerging from the oversized sleeves of that bizarre embroidered cheesecloth _thing_ he’s wearing to play around the flame of the candle stuck, absurdly, in an empty wine bottle in the centre of the table.

 

“ – but now, right now, all these old outdated barriers between the classes, between black and white, men and women, rich and poor, they're all collapsing, the people are ready to build a completely new and equal world where everyone is free to – “

 

Grantaire surmises he's had some of what Courfeyrac's having. He glances at the remnants of the café's clientele, most of them dressed uniformly fashionably or else, like Enjolras, in an appropriated approximation of workwear, heavy boots and denim. Over the course of the evening they have spent perhaps the equivalent of a factory worker's daily pay on getting drunk and stoned – not to escape their lot, but to enhance it, to aid in its enjoyment. Their sympathy with their ideas of oppression are one thing, but their experiences of it begin and end with their essays being marked lower than their entitlement had led them to expect. (He may as well simply say: these aren't the People, they are _students_.)

 

He will never quite say this to Enjolras' face. He does, however, take the seat beside him and, as ever, try to draw him into relatively intimate engagement in the only way he can, through deliberate and needless disagreement. He tries not to think about the way Enjolras bites his lower lip in frustration as Grantaire speaks, how charmingly obvious he makes the internal conflict between his wish to deliver a stinging rhetorical slap as a rejoinder to Grantaire's cynicism and his principled desire to listen respectfully to contributions from all potential recruits to the cause. Grantaire tries particularly not to think about taking that cap off and twining his fingers in Enjolras' hair, about bringing their mouths together, hard and sudden, about insistently kissing him into an astonished and indignant fury – since even he would be hard-pushed to justify that as a constructive contribution to debate, apart from it being, perhaps, the only silencing tactic to which Enjolras might ever acquiesce, although Grantaire wouldn't bet money on it.

 

He continues to needle instead, appreciating the way it makes Enjolras’ fingers tense around his coffee cup: “But what makes you certain of a revolution now – let alone a successful one, when no revolution has been much of an unqualified success so far? Why now, when so many of us are happier, safer, richer, more content than our ancestors ever were? No one rebels on a full stomach, my friend. We’ve never had it so good.”

 

Enjolras scowls. “You sound like you're on stage at the Democratic Convention, _friend_. If I were you I’d find out exactly what the CIA are putting in your drink."

 

“Far be it from me to treat this subject with glibness or levity,” says Grantaire, “but something may be true even if the Democratic Party says it is.”

 

“And besides,” he tries, finally, in as riling a manner as possible, “couldn't you have picked a marginally more edifying song than that one, as your closing note? What does 'the answer is blowing in the wind' even mean?”

 

Enjolras looks at him with something too cold to be pity. His gaze flickers upwards, and Grantaire’s follows, to where, among the posters and the murals and the various dilapidated drapery, a makeshift red flag is pinned across the wall above the table.

 

The red flag is not blowing in the wind. It is hanging limp and tattered in the smoke and candlelight. Grantaire rolls his eyes and drains his glass.

 


End file.
